


It Is This That The Darkness Is For

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1, Stargate SG-1 AU: Eurydiceverse
Genre: Alternate Universe, Future Fic, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-17
Updated: 2007-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 09:37:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2768351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The time is Christmas, a few years from now.  The place is the Eurydiceverse.  Or Minnesota.  Or both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Is This That The Darkness Is For

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Make Crosses Of Your Lovers](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/87458) by Synecdochic. 



> Here's a Eurydiceverse story, appropriate to the season. All the characters are MGM's, and the situations are [](http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/)**synecdochic** 's: I'm just borrowing them for a Yuletide revel.
> 
> This will make a bit more sense if you read [](http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**synecdochic**](http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/)'s [Make Crosses From Your Lovers](http://www.kekkai.org/synecdochic/sg1/make_crosses_from_your_lovers.html) first (as well as refreshing your memory of S9/10 continuity), but most of what you need to know is that this is the story that takes place, chronologically, after the end of Eurydiceverse.
> 
> The title comes from Leonard Cohen's "Lady Midnight":
> 
> _Well, I argued all night like so many have before,_  
>  _Saying, "Whatever you give me, I seem to need so much more."_  
>  _Then she pointed at me where I kneeled on her floor,_  
>  _She said, "Don't try to use me or slyly refuse me,_  
>  _Just win me or lose me,_  
>  _It is this that the darkness is for."_  
> 

 

She never understood about Christmas for the longest time. Of course, there'd been no such thing on the planet where she'd been born. Seasons, yes. A mid-winter holiday, yes (later, so many years later, Daniel Jackson told her that nearly every culture had those, though by then she could have told him very much the same thing, thanks to Qetesh).

And then she came to Earth, casting off old lives and old habits like the costumes (garish vestments, whorish leathers) she no longer wore. It was on Earth that she first heard of Christmas. Cameron Mitchell spoke of it with the longing that most men reserved for places (lost homelands, as her home was lost to her.) He promised to take her there (she isn't sure, even now, so many years later, whether it was a token of trust-implied or merely the hope of it, but Cameron Mitchell was always loving and affectionate and the years never hardened him; Daniel saw to that), but before he could, she'd taken a journey to another, colder place than a Christmas winter. There were no festivals, no celebrations, in the Ori galaxy.

She came home to them in summer (she already thought of Earth as home, strangely, though her welcome there had been sometimes forced and often grudging: even Daniel's fierce championship seemed to be of some other woman than the woman she thought she was). She returned weighted down with a husband she did not love and the shame of becoming -- once again -- someone else's weapon, a pawn on the chessboard of would-be gods. And there was no Christmas that year with Daniel gone (it was as if the day itself had been removed from the _Tau'ri_ calendar) but Christmas (she knew already) was for the exchanging of gifts, and that year she received a great gift. Jack.

And then the New Year came (the _Tau'ri_ mis-name so many things, but for once they managed to get something right: Daniel came back to them again, alive, renewed, and so many things were new that year, because Daniel reinvented them as he had reinvented himself.) And the months passed, the brief inevitable wheel of the _Tau'ri_ year, in a universe free of the Ori, where there was Jack for her (where there was Daniel for her), where she could begin to see the shape of the world to come (but she would not speak of it; Vala understood the power of secrets, and their delicacy). And that year (at last, a long time coming) there was Christmas. Her first.

And years pass and slowly they (the six of them) remake themselves, fitting themselves into the shape of the world to come, a world she'd once been unable to imagine (and more than that, unable to believe in.) Where Teal'c (brother and comrade and constant advocate) can walk back through the Stargate (as, she has been told so often, in stories being refined even now into new myths for a new age) he once walked through it to them, returning at last to his interrupted life to take up the yoke of dreams and freedom for the last of his people. Where Sam can have her Cam (where Daniel can, at last, relinquish _his_ Cam, gently and with faint reluctance, though he will never truly lift his hand from Cameron Mitchell, nor will Mitchell ever step fully from beneath the hand of the man who recalled him to life; Vala knows many secrets); where Jack can, at last, set down the weight he has carried for so long. _'My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land…'_

She believes in no gods. But there is poetry in the holy books of Daniel's world.

It is quiet here. Quiet, and green in its season, and once (freed of Qetesh, angered and frightened by the voices that lingered in her mind) she would have fled from quiet, from the soft insinuations of trees and water, from her true image reflected in men's eyes. It is years since she has feared the sight of herself reflected in Jack's eyes, in Daniel's. Her courage was her dowry when she came to this world (to them). It let her live (when life was a burden, when survival was a weapon); it was the only thing she had to offer up. Her gift for the giving, when she thought both hands and heart were empty.

And she thinks (without hubris, without arrogance) that her gift has saved the two of them, and the thing that is both more and less than the two of them (the three of them), and brought them to live here, among quiet trees beside a quiet lake (in the sprawling ever-expanding space that Jack calls 'the cabin' and in response Daniel just laughs) where the three of them can live without names, without labels, without history.

To live without history is the greatest gift, she thinks. Their histories are filled with knives and darkness and traps for the unwary. The present, the moment, is a world of sunlight and clean linen and warmth and good food. Of Daniel with his books, and Jack's long rambles through his woods, and long silent hours by the water and the fire (it took time to bury dark associations of blood and worship beneath marshmallows and cocoa and autumn leaves and woodsmoke, but it has happened, with time and care). The present is a world of taking care (as she takes care of both of them; an unexpected and late-blossoming talent). This will be her life for as long as life is, she thinks. She has traded the vaster universe of uncounted worlds for this small and comfortable place, but it contains all that she needs and wants. Friends and lovers. Peace, and the passage of seasons.

Christmas.

Christmas comes each year. Jack would not permit the existence of a universe in which it didn't. Tree and gifts and Daniel bickering with him about the mess and the archaic ritual and the disruption of their routine, the act as much a ritual itself as the tree, the popcorn garlands, the mulled cider, the stockings hung over the fireplace.

In December the snow in Silver Lake is deep.

At night the winter stars are brilliant in a sky that is brightly black. It is not the blackness or the stars she could see from the _pel'tak_ of a ship, but she does not long for that. The colorless flickering of the distant suns through the veil of atmosphere is a symbol of the life she has won; she cherishes it. In winter, Jack's lake sleeps beneath a sheet of ice; thick enough to walk on by February, still untrustworthy in December. A smooth and gleaming sheet of white, giving back moonlight and starlight as if radiation-kissed. In winter, Jack covers the truck and the Jeep with tarps between uses to keep off the worst of the snow and ice – (a garage is in next year's building plans) (it's been in next year's building plans for several years; something's always more important) -- and shovels neat and careful paths to the woodpile and the generator. For longer walks (he takes them sometimes, needing air, needing space) he wears something called _snowshoes_ (like all _Tau'ri_ words, inaccurate, since they aren't shoes at all; Daniel calls them 'tennis rackets for the feet'). When Vala takes walks in winter, she does not wear _snowshoes_ ; she is light enough to be able to stay upon the surface of the snow (heavy and dense, after the first freeze), and she never goes far. She walks at night, and the nights are cold.

Most years the wind (bitter as ice and memory) has blown the snow clear of the dock, and she walks out on that. It's far enough to look up at the sky ( _the Bowl of Heaven,_ alien memories whisper in her ear, and she buries them deep) and to look back at the cabin. Its windows are small and the porch is deep. Most nights the curtains are drawn, holding in the warmth, but a few rays of light always escape, bright and golden, turning the night-blue snow to white, making it sparkle like a precious thing (like so much in her life, her notions of what is precious have evolved over time). She stands at the very end of the time-worn wood (older than Jack, older than his father, not old by the standards she has learned over time), her position compassing as much risk as she is willing to assume in this brave new world (the borrowed rhythms of Daniel's world echo through her mind like hoarded treasure, conquering older echoes with their song), looking up, looking out, looking back.

At Christmas, the curtains are always open. She supposes it's another tradition, the display of the tree, even though there's no one (really) but her to see. Even if it's pointless, it's pretty. Gaudy in a way _Tau'ri_ ornamentation rarely is. Lights and garlands and ornaments (each one, in its presence and in the absence of something else, carrying the weight of history spoken and unspoken, and of bickering she has heard -- because it is lovemaking given voice -- and arguments she has not heard, because they are anger strangled to voicelessness). She knows from Cameron that traditionally the ornaments that decorate such a tree are passed down through the generations, but all the ornaments on this tree are new. There is a story there better left unspoken.

The night smells of woodsmoke and cold north wind and snow. Vala insists that snow has a smell and Daniel says it can't possibly (Daniel says that snow is only frozen water) but Jack agrees with her that it does. The cabin (she knows) smells of woodsmoke in a different way (the sweet fragrance of well-seasoned wood, chopped by Jack and by Daniel through summer and fall and delivered by surprising truckload from town since Jack said they could never possibly chop enough to last the winter) and of pine (the Christmas tree) and of the seasonal delicacies she has learned to make (bread and cake and cookies and pies.) Of Daniel's coffee and (faintly) of Jack's Scotch; there is the round scent of mulling cider and soon there will be the sweet woody scent of roasting chestnuts, and Daniel will ask if Jack could be any _more_ of a cliché, and Jack will say that clichés are clichés for a reason, Daniel. But before that final moment comes, Jack will come out into the darkness to fetch her (if she lingers too long beneath the winter stars), because there is a precise mechanism in Jack O'Neill's head that measures climate and temperature and all the human odds of survival in every situation.

And he is as sensitive to the changes in the emotional weather as he is to the other, and how many times has she looked out at a cloudless morning only to see him assess the sky and shake his head and speak of rain? She does not think it is merely the messages sent by old scars and broken bones -- legacies of a lifetime of service -- that tell him so. She thinks he has lived (and sometimes died, when his luck ran cold) by being attuned to _what will be_ , and she thinks that is a sense that will never leave him. It is that which brought him to Daniel in the long ago, brought him to her, brought the three of them here.

Most nights, when she leaves the safety and warmth and care of the cabin to walk through the cold of the winter's night, she takes care to turn back before her absence summons him to her side. A vital man, but not a young man (though he, like she, has felt the malign kiss of the sarcophagus; all three of them, in their ways, are housed in imperfectly-translated flesh) and it is unfair to draw him into the hyperborean night because of her whims. Tonight she lingers, caught between sparkling tree and sparkling stars, and at last she sees the cabin door swing open.

She hears the crunch of boots over snow as he comes toward her, a bulky figure in heavy coat and ear-flapped cap. She's certain he could move silently if he chose. He's never done so in her presence. She walks back along the dock without haste. They meet at the shore. He offers his arm, steadying her as she crosses from wood to snow.

"You're freezing," he says. It isn't a question. It's a statement of fact, and Vala laughs. "It's winter," she answers.

"It's Minnesota," he says, as if that's the answer to all questions, night and cold and winter. Perhaps it is. "Come on," he says, as they turn back toward the cabin. "Some cocoa'll warm you up."

"Tell me you did _not_ let Daniel into my kitchen," she says in warning alarm.

It's his turn to laugh, a quiet huff of amusement. "Daniel knows better," he answers. "Everything but the coffeemaker is strictly off-limits. I know how to heat milk, though. If we hurry, we can get back there before it burns."

"Asshole," Vala says comprehensively.

"Language," Jack answers, still entertained (as always) by her assumption of outrageousness. She plays the clown for him deliberately, and he lets her. One of their many survival strategies. "What will the neighbors say?" he adds.

"If they're smart, they'll say I'm a lucky girl," she says briskly. "Presuming, of course, I'm going to get lucky." They've reached the porch; she leans on his arm enough for him to feel her touch as they step up. A courtesy.

"I'll have to check my datebook," he answers drily, and Vala smiles.

"I know what day it is." What day it became, rather, just a few minutes ago. She's always had an excellent sense of time.

"So do I," he answers, stopping, turning to face her, just outside the door that leads to warmth and love and home and Daniel and all the things she'd never known she wanted (once upon a time) and never thought she could have (for nearly as long). "Merry Christmas, sweetheart," he says.

And all those things are sweet, but a wintery kiss shared on their threshold, in anticipation of them, is sweeter. "Merry Christmas, Jack," she answers.

###


End file.
